High School

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Lights, Candles, Action! Performance Task

This performance task is part of the Smarter Balanced Practice test. The task stimulus describes two candles that are being used in a scene for a movie. The stimulus provides the initial heights and burn rates of the candles, together with pictures of the candles before they are lit and 1 hour after they are lit. Students are required to reason about the decreasing heights of the candles as they burn at different rates in the context of filming the movie scene. There are six items in the task. The task is designed to support students in building directly on their reasoning from earlier items of the task in order to complete later items of the task.

Download Case Studies

Each case study provides an analysis of an individual student’s responses to all of the questions in a performance task, unpacks the scoring, and considers next steps for supporting the student to demonstrate college- and career-readiness. Case studies 1 and 2 are analyses of English Learner (EL) students’ responses to the performance task.